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"Contains lines so heartbreakingly apt and funny I stopped to reread constantly. Cohen is a natural." Jonathan Lethem
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0374272298
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family.
It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream.
 Media BuzzDiane Rehm Show - NPR - July 23, 2013
All Things Considered - May 21, 2006
Larry King Live - May 6, 2006
All Things Considered - March 28, 2006
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